u/notwim

I know the answer is most likely to to pay for it, i am just hoping there is another way.

Recently I have been trying out Zed and I really like it. At the same time I have also been trying out different agentic coding platforms to determine which one is the best fit for me. This led me to trying out Cursor. I really like their Composer 2 model, it performs great for it's price category. But, after trying out Zed the Cursor ide just doesn't do it for me.

So, I had an editor I liked and I had a coding agent provider I really like. This got me thinking if it is possible to combine the two. Turns out it is possible!

Step 1: Install the Cursor CLI

Go to cursor.com/download and grab the CLI installer for your platform.

Step 2: Authenticate

cli:

agent login

Opens a browser, log in with your Cursor account. You need an active Cursor Pro subscription for Composer 2 access.

Step 3: Install the Cursor ACP extension in Zed

Open Zed → Agent menu → Settings → External Agents → Add Agent → Install from registry The Cursor agent (v2026.03.30) should already be in the ACP Registry. Install it from there. It's the official one maintained by Cursor.

Alternatively add it manually to ~/.config/zed/settings.json:

"agent_servers": {
  "Cursor": {
    "type": "custom",
    "command": "agent",
    "args": ["acp"]
  }
}

Step 4: Open a new thread with the Cursor Agent
Open Zed's agent panel, start a new thread, click the model selector at the bottom right — you'll see a dropdown with composer 2, composer-1.5, claude-sonnet-4-6, gpt-5.5, etc. Select composer-2 and you're good to go.

Happy to answer questions if anyone gets stuck on this, it took a while to figure out. I was doing things all wrong at first. I did this while working on a personal project (offline llm-enabled note app) and I am just trying to figure out a workflow to works for me.